By: Mark Lieberman

The Case Shiller Home Price Indexes rose for the first time in eight months in April. The 10- and 20-city indexes each rose 1.3 percent, to the highest levels this year. Year-over-year, the 10-city index was down 2.2 percent and the 20-city index off 1.9 percent, both improvements from March.

Economists had expected the 20-city index to show a 2.3 percent year-year decline in April.

Prices improved month-month in all but one of the 20 cities tracked by Case Shiller; prices fell 3.6 percent in Detroit. Prices were up year-year in 10 of the 20 cities

I’ve long marveled at how the prospect of buying or selling a home can transform the most patient poetry professor or the sweetest Sunday school teacher into a fast-talking, number-crunching, negotiator extraordinaire. Or, rather, it can make these sorts of people *think* they need to talk and act like wheeler-dealers! In my experience, this mostly involves ranting about “leaving money on the table” while they secretly quiver with the fear of making a mistake!

But offers and negotiations aren’t the only real estate decisions that make people think they should be more strategic than they are legitimately equipped to be. Many buyers and sellers believe they should know precisely how to time the market to buy at the bottom and sell at the top, despite the facts that: